


Thirteenth Stepping

by glorious_spoon



Category: Iron Fist (TV), Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Friendship, Gen, Head Injury, Trapped
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:08:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23951323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: Ward Meachum and Isabelle Lightwood strike up a friendship in rehab, but neither of them was expecting their worlds to collide like this.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 33
Collections: Hurt/Comfort Bingo - Round 10





	Thirteenth Stepping

**Author's Note:**

> For the Hurt/Comfort Bingo April Amnesty Challenge. Also, this is one of the crackiest concepts I've ever written, so... yeah. IDK.

“Hey,” Ward says. “Don’t go to sleep.”

“I’m not.” Isabelle sounds dazed. It’s too dark in here for him to tell how her pupils are dilating in the dim light of his phone screen, but given how she sounds there’s really no doubt that she’s concussed. A moment later she tilts forward and Ward reaches out to catch her, panic flaring, before he realizes that she’s scrabbling around on the ground looking for something. “My stele, where’s my stele?”

“Okay, first of all, I have no idea what that is, and second of all, take it from someone who’s had more than a few concussions, you really need to stay still. Because if you puke on me, you’re paying for this jacket.”

“I can afford it,” Isabelle says blearly, but she stops moving. “Must have lost it when--when—”

“When the building fell on us?” Ward offers.

She smiles briefly up at him. “Yeah. That.”

“You seem pretty calm about that, all things considered.” That might be the concussion talking, though. He jiggles his phone, like he can conjure up a cell signal that way. At least there’s plenty of battery life, for all the good that does them. Maybe they can record their goodbyes to be found whenever the emergency crews get around to unearthing their suffocated carcasses from under several hundred thousand pounds of rubble. That seems like the kind of maudlin, morbid shit that Danny would appreciate.

Jesus, this is going to kill Danny. It probably says something that Ward is more worried about that than about his own likely impending demise.

Isabelle laughs distantly, then winces. “This is not actually the worst thing that’s happened to me in the past few months.”

“Wow,” Ward says, then pauses, considering. This actually _is_ the worst thing that’s happened to him in the past few months, but by an uncomfortably small margin.

Isabelle pats him clumsily on the arm. “Bet you’re regretting trying to thirteenth-step me now, huh?”

“Hey. That was not thirteenth-stepping, that was an innocent and friendly offer of coffee. Which I never would have made if I expected us to get chased in here by wizards.”

“Good. Because I have a boyfriend.” She makes no comment about the wizards.

“Yeah, and I have way too many complications in my life already.” He pauses. NA meetings have a kind of intimacy to them that makes it easy to forget sometimes how little he actually knows about anyone there. Isabelle has been coming sporadically for the better part of a year, and he knows all about the ups and downs of her recovery and almost nothing about her actual life.

Isabelle is starting to tilt again, and this time he doesn’t think it’s on purpose. He catches her shoulder. Her arms are bare, her skin grimy and cool. He chafes them gently, then says, “Hey. Don’t go to sleep, I mean it.”

“I’m not,” she says blearily.

“Yeah, right.” Ward looks up as something creaks overhead. A shower of dust scatters across them, then settles. There’s a pang of fear, but it’s weirdly dulled, possibly by the fact that he can’t actually _do_ anything about it if the rest of the building falls on them right now. “Hey. Isabelle. What’s your boyfriend’s name?”

She blinks at him slowly. There’s grit caught in her eyelashes. Finally, she says, “Simon.”

“Simon, okay. What’s he like?”

Her eyes close again, then open. “Sweet. He’s sweet.”

“Yeah?” He’s no good at this, not really. But it’s not like there’s any other option. “We’ll get out of here. You’ll see him again.”

“You really think so?”

 _No._ “Yeah, sure. Of course.”

She makes a soft sound like a laugh. “No, you don’t.”

“Okay, no, I don’t,” Ward concedes. “But I’m a pessimist, ask anybody.”

“Hmm,” she says vaguely. And then, “I’m sorry you ended up involved in this.”

“What, you mean the magic-wielding psychos who dropped a building on us? Pretty sure that wasn’t your fault. Actually, it’s probably mine.”

“No, that was a splinter sect of…” Isabelle trails off, squinting up at him with a look that’s slightly more alert. “What do you mean, it was your fault? You’re a mundane.”

“Yeah, thanks a lot. No superpowers, I just hang around the wrong crowd.” He pauses. “Wait, you think they were after _you?_ ”

“I know they were. The Shadow World is in upheaval, and—” she breaks off again, shakes her head, then stops. “I shouldn’t be telling you about this.”

Something creaks overhead again, and Ward sighs, leaning back against her shoulder. She’s sturdy, even like this, more solid than she looks. “Tell you the truth, I don’t think it really matters. This thing is going to come down on top of us, or we’re going to suffocate, so shoot. Here, I’ll start. I spent twelve years working for my undead father, who was controlled by a vast criminal conspiracy.”

Isabelle huffs laughter and tilts back against him. “I hunt demons for a living.”

“My brother was raised in a city in another dimension after his plane crashed in the Himalayas.”

“My brother is married to a prince of Hell, and I'm dating a vampire.”

There’s another, louder creak, and a shower of dust falls over them. Isabelle coughs into his shoulder, then wraps an arm around him. It’s a comforting kind of gesture, and Ward wishes he could be more comforted by it; all he can think, though, is that at least he’s not going to die alone—

And then there’s a rush of blue light and the pile of rubble overhead suddenly vanishes.

There’s a cool wash of air, rain-scented and entirely disorienting. Ward thinks, dazed, _huh, I thought dying would hurt more_ , and then Isabelle sags against him, laughs, and says, “Magnus. They found us.”

“What?” he asks, but there are footsteps rushing closer, voices. He thinks he can pick out Danny’s voice, and Colleen’s, but the first person who vaults down into the basement is a tall, dark-haired stranger with a bow strung over his back.

“Izzy?” he says. “Izzy! Are you—”

She waves a hand at him, loosely. “I’m fine.”

“Let me guess,” Ward says. “You’d be the boyfriend.”

“Brother, actually,” the man says, with barely a glance at him. “Who’s the mundane?”

“Wow, thanks a lot.” The guy ignores him. He’s pulling out what looks like a very short wand made out of crystal and sketching something on the side of Isabelle’s head. Red light flares under her dark hair, then vanishes. Only then does he treat Ward to a sidelong, suspicious kind of glance that he recognizes entirely too well from his unfortunate familiarity with mysterious masked superheroes.

He sighs. “Never happened, I saw nothing, et cetera, no need to give me the Men In Black treatment.”

The sidelong look intensifies. “What.”

“You need to get with modern pop culture, Alec,” Isabelle says, patting his arm and then using her grip in his jacket to pull herself upright. She gives Ward an apologetic kind of smile that seems way more with it than she has for the past hour or so. “This is Ward. He’s, um. He’s a friend.”

“By a very loose definition of the term,” Ward says. Isabelle grins at him; Alec scowls. “Also, _Men in Black_ came out twenty-plus years ago, at which point I’m guessing you were both still in diapers. Modern is probably stretching it.”

“We’ll work on it,” Isabelle says with a bright grin, climbing to her feet. There’s no sign of a concussion now, other than the blood all crusted down the side of her face. Ward takes the hand she offers, and she hauls him up without any visible effort. He sways once he’s on his feet, still disoriented. A minute ago, there was most of a building on top of them. Right now, there’s--nothing. Just open air and a misting rain and flood lights sweeping over the whole scene. Police are streaming in, but they seem oblivious to anything that’s going on. Like they can’t even see it.

“Not to sound ungrateful,” Ward manages after a moment, “but what the hell just happened.”

“Magnus,” Alec says shortly, with a nod toward the edge of the building. “I think those are your people.”

Ward squints through the rain. Sure enough, there’s Colleen, glowing sword in hand, and Danny, looking like a drowned rat; beside him is a tall Asian guy dressed like he stepped out of the middle of some glam rock concert. Blue fire twines around his hands and the air seems to warp around him, like he's occupying a slightly different plane of existence than everyone else.

“Prince of Hell,” Ward says, blankly. “I presume.”

“Magnus Bane, the High Warlock of Brooklyn,” Isabelle says, as Danny catches sight of them and vaults into the now-open basement. Alec makes an annoyed sound, but there’s a glint of mischief in Isabelle's face as she smiles up at him. “Come on. I think we all have a _lot_ to talk about.”


End file.
